‘I’ve Got Your Number’ A Woman’s Perspective: Robust Music, Racy Lyrics

The New York Times Music Review, by Stephen Holden, March 31, 2008

Fundador, a Spanish brandy reputedly favored by Ernest Hemingway, conspicuously entered American popular song literature in 1964 with the Cy Coleman-Carolyn Leigh hit “When in Rome (I Do as the Romans Do).” Ms. Leigh’s racy lyrics in this paean to self-indulgent tourism insist, “Don’t deplore my fondness for Fundador/You know how a Fundador can lead to a few/And baby/ When in Rome I do as the Romans do.” It was performed on Saturday evening at the 92nd Street Y by Karen Ziemba as an amused tribute to Anita Ekberg’s trance-dance in the Trevi Fountain in “La Dolce Vita.”

Karen Ziemba and Jay Leonhart performing in “I’ve Got Your Number,” part of the Lyrics & Lyricists series at the 92nd Street Y.

That edifying nugget of trivia was dropped by Deborah Grace Winer, the host of “I’ve Got Your Number: Romance, the Rat Pack and Carolyn Leigh,” the newest program in the 92nd Street Y’s Lyrics & Lyricists series. (Its final two of five performances are Monday.)

In some ways the show is a sequel to last season’s homage to Rosemary Clooney, a program also conceived by Ms. Winer and featuring several of the same performers. This year, besides Ms. Ziemba, James Naughton and Debby Boone, the roster includes the suave singer and pianist Loston Harris. Once again the musical director is John Oddo (Ms. Clooney’s former conductor), whose inventive swing arrangements for five musicians, including the bassist Jay Leonhart, create a robust big-band sound.

Ms. Winer, recently named the overall artistic director of Lyrics & Lyricists, is the author of “On the Sunny Side of the Street: The Life and Lyrics of Dorothy Fields.” In examining the life of Ms. Leigh, who died in 1983 at 57, Ms. Winer places her as the successor to Fields, not only because both were women in a male-dominated field but also because both collaborated with Cy Coleman, and both wrote songs from a female perspective. Leigh’s lyrics, Ms. Winer astutely noted, were “Fields’s lyrics put through psychoanalysis.”

Demure and glamorous, Ms. Winer is ideally suited to the delicate task of infusing the long-running series with new energy without upsetting its staid format, and her new show refines a polished blend of scholarship and anecdotal biography. Her illustration of Ms. Leigh’s feminine perspective is the 1958 ballad “It Amazes Me” (also sung by Ms. Ziemba), whose self-critical narrator, looking at herself through the eyes of a lover, finds her passion (in Ms. Winer’s words) simultaneously “requited and unrequited.”

The unrequited part, Ms. Winer implied, was Ms. Leigh’s own self-doubt. A fierce perfectionist, she kept a worry book.

The show’s nifty matches of performer to material included Mr. Naughton’s “Westport,” an obscure comic number about suburban adultery from a 1957 Julius Monk revue; Mr. Harris‘s boyish “I Won’t Grow Up” (from “Peter Pan”); and Ms. Boone’s torchy, lovelorn “On Second Thought.”

How formidable an artist was Ms. Leigh? In her greatest lyrics, including “You Fascinate Me So” (Mr. Naughton), “(How Little It Matters) How Little We Know” (Ms. Boone), “Witchcraft” (the entire cast), she could go one-on-one with the best of Cole Porter and come up even.

“I’ve Got Your Number” repeats Monday at 2 and 8 p.m. at the 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue, (212) 415-5500; www.92Y.org/concerts.